Oh, come now, John. It's strictly a marketing question -- If you made it into a tapestry sort of thing and called it "Threnody for Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine," it would go over better (no one outside the hardcorest of hardcore admirers know who Abe was). Then again, you could record it with a ten piece symphony and still probably be one up on Abe!

Actually, Rich, not all that much "Abe Meyer" music is heard in the MONOGRAM NINE, and in fact, bits of music from THE BLACK ROOM - Which is a Karloffian "Klassic" I believe? -found its way into SPOOKS RUN WILD and I believe, at least one other film. A lot of the tracks "borrow" stuff from THE DEVIL BAT (which has never really been identified as to who composed it, other than giving credit to David Chudnow as "Musical Director").

I'm not positively sure whether or not the music from THE BLACK ROOM was from another film, or whether or not it was composed FOR that film. However, I suspect that music was composed for THE BLACK ROOM as so many variations on the main themes run throughout the entire film, and it surely does NOT seem to be a "cut and paste job" as many of those scores from library film music certainly were! It turns up later in the Columbia serial, THE SECRET OF TREASURE ISLAND and bits of it still can be heard in SUPERMAN almost 15 years later in 1948!

Most of the "Abe Meyer" music library showed up in films before the ASCAP decree in 1938 that major studios no longer use recorded music for a movie soundtrack. Abe Meyer's music library was used in newsreels, Westerns (some of the early HOPALONG CASSIDY films used the Meyer arrangement of C.Gluck's "The Dance of the Furies"), mysteries and of course, horror films. A good place to sample the kind of music from Meyer's library can be heard in serials like DARKEST AFRICA, THE RETURN OF CHANDU and THE UNDERSEA KINGDOM, to name a few. Horror films naturally used the mysterious and sometimes melodramatic themes for WHITE ZOMBIE, THE VAMPIRE BAT and ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT. Westerns, as I've said used a lot of this music for cattle stampedes, etc. from "Poverty Row" to Paramount. Meyer was not the only music library in town - there was also Sam Fox, and the studios themselves had their own music libraries. But after 1938, the major studios were supposed to "can" all their "can" music and have everything newly recorded. I believe composer Hans Salter was quoted once by saying that Universal sometimes still used their older recordings, but even if they did, they still had to pay musicians to do their own version of it.

So, by the '40s, the Abe Meyer music library was no more. How Monogram scooped some of the recordings up for THE MONOGRAM NINE is not known, but the two guys listed as "Musical Directors" - Lange and Porter - were with ASCAP, so maybe they used the old recordings through a legal loophole, or agreed to pay ASCAP some kind of fee. All except the last of the MONOGRAM NINE - VOODOO MAN and THE RETURN OF THE APE MAN - are made up of composites of older musical scores. - Mr. Len

Quote:How Monogram scooped some of the recordings up for THE MONOGRAM NINE is not known, but the two guys listed as "Musical Directors" - Lange and Porter - were with ASCAP, so maybe they used the old recordings through a legal loophole, or agreed to pay ASCAP some kind of fee.

David Chudnow used some of the same music on the (blessedly) non-Erdody horror films. I imagine that the use of the ASCAP label on Lange and Porter was the dodge itself. If I recall correctly, they leased the Meyer library. Then again, the question arises: just exactly what was ASCAP going to do to these studios if they used existing recordings?

For all of us Abe Meyer fans, it looks like someone has updated both DARKEST AFRICA & UNDERSEA KINGDOM on IMDB with various composers contributing to the
scores. Of course, IMDB should never be considered 100% accurate, but it's interesting anyway... and hopefully a start on more info re this library.